Here in south London, trout season opens later than elsewhere, and it’s just another quirk of fishing in the 21st century that social media isn’t letting me forget it.

Starting in early March, my Instagram and Twitter feeds have steadily been filling up with photos from big trout hunters in Scotland, Eden, Derbyshire, Wales and the West Country. If it’s not the trout themselves, it’s the flies that have been carefully tied to catch them: Jinglers for Large Dark Olives, and plenty of March Browns in case this hatch lives up to the promise of recent Easter weekends and sends the trout into what witnesses can only describe, with a kind of religious awe, as a feeding frenzy…

My latest article has just appeared in issue 9 of Fallon’s Angler, and it’s a compare-and-contrast of early season fishing in the south and the north (for the record, I’m a big fan of both, but it’d definitely be easier to live somewhere not in the south at the kind of cabin-feverish time when I wrote this piece!)